Planet Telex

one evening at rak

Most of The Bends was already written when the band reached RAK. This one was written and recorded there, in a single evening, and John Leckie, who produced the album, has said it was the only song on the album that was never rehearsed.

It started from a drum loop cut out of an early version of another song, the B-side “Killer Cars”, looped on the computer rather than played again on the kit. Piano went over the top, fed through three old Roland Space Echo units in a row.

The band don't really drink but one night we went to a restaurant

john leckie · classic pop, 17 december 2022

They came back with a few bottles of wine inside them and made the song up. Thom Yorke sang it in one take, drunk, crouched in a corner, as the band's fan-club booklet tells it; this site's 2003 lyrics page has him lying down. Leckie told Mac Randall, for his book Exit Music, they had the whole thing finished inside a couple of hours, and that it was refreshing and fun. It was still called “Planet Xerox” then, and the name changed when Xerox would not let the band use its trademark.

track one

It opens the album on Space Echo whooshes and reverberating piano chords before the drums crash in. Like most of the record it was mixed by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie.

The words list what can be done to a thing, forcing it, tasting it, crushing it, without making it go away, and the chorus decides that everything and everyone is broken. It ends on a question repeated three times, about why it cannot be forgotten. For a song sung drunk it is fairly sharp.

Thirty-one years after the album came out, Ed O'Brien still pointed at it. Talking to Uncut in 2026, he gave it as his example of how much wider The Bends was than Pablo Honey, and Phil Selway, talking about The Bends in 2015, named it first among the old songs that still worked in the 2012 set.

the remixes

It came out ahead of the album, on 27 February 1995, as a double A-side with “High and Dry”, and this site's 2003 page called it the most remixed song the band had. Steve Osborne made two for the single, the Hexidecimal Mix and Dub, L.F.O. made another, and later that year U.N.K.L.E.'s Karma Sunra mix went onto the first CD of “Just”.

In 1996 Addicted To Noise asked whether the next album would be as experimental as the remixes. Jonny Greenwood said it would be experimental, but nothing like that.

[It will be] weirder than anything else.

jonny greenwood · addicted to noise, 1996

barcelona, a joke for colin

Its first night in the archive is New York, NY on 2 November 1994. The tours for The Bends and OK Computer carried it between them, 74 nights in 1995 and 67 in 1997, and 17 of its 270 nights have started with it. When it opened in Madrid on 7 November 2025 it was the first time since 2008.

When OK Computer was about to come out, the band played two showcases at the Zeleste in Barcelona in late May 1997, for EMI's staff and the press, and Jonny laid a new riff over “Planet Telex”. Stuart Bailie of NME heard it as a nod to the Fall and a private joke for Jonny's brother Colin. Craig Scanlon, the Fall's guitarist, was in the crowd on the second night, 24 May, asked for “Creep” and got it.

tago mago

In Rome in May 1995, talking to Caitlin Moran, Yorke was asked whether the start of it was lifted from Paul McCartney's “Live and Let Die”.

We nicked ‘Planet Telex’ from ‘Tago Mago’ by Can. So fuck off, we are arty us.

thom yorke · melody maker, 10 june 1995